Fury: Q&A with Andrew Edelsten

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Get all the facts on maps, power-ups and Auran's plans for global MMO domination.

By Patrick Kolan

Last week, Brisbane developer Auran held a tell-all event on their world-class MMO, Fury. We were lucky enough to secure exclusive access to one of Fury's new maps, 'Courtyard', which you can brush up on right here, or read all about the back-story here. We also took the opportunity to sit down with Andrew Edelsten, Game Operations Manager at Auran, for an in-depth look at why you should sit up and take notice.

Update: You can now register for the Fury Pre-Beta right now over at FilePlanet! What are you waiting for? Be there now.

IGN: You're demonstrating a mostly-complete build of Fury now. How many maps are you planning on releasing in the final version? Can you take us through the game types, too?

Andrew Edelsten: We're looking, ideally, at six maps for each game type. There are four game types; there's Elimination - your four vs. four, there's Bloodbath - a 32 player free-for-all, Vortex is 16 on 16; it's a variation on capture-the-flag; the big game-type is Fortress - up to 32 players on each team, huge castles on either end of the map and those maps are huge. They take you quite a while to traverse. We're still trying to iron out some gameplay 'kinks' on Fortress, though.

IGN: Oh yeah? What kinds of kinks have popped up?

Andrew Edelsten: There's just certain things that take away from it being fun. The core game is fun, but we want to make sure each game type is just as fun as well.

IGN: How big is your Beta testing team right now?

Andrew Edelsten: We have 20 internal beta testers working on it right now, and then we outsource some of the testing - and there are 60 of them - and then we also have what we're calling Pre-Beta testers, and we have several thousand of them. And that's what we're doing with IGN - that's just about to launch. It's a mail-out next week, so fans should look out for that.

Great character design, backed by Unreal Engine 3.

IGN: We've heard you're going to be holding global event in three or four months - kind of like an open beta. Can you discuss this?

Andrew Edelsten: Yeah, there's talk of doing some pre-launch open weekends and so on. The closed- or 'pre-beta' as we're calling it is very important from a testing point of view. We can make sure the servers can handle the load and there aren't any abilities that suddenly wipe the whole team out or anything like that! We've done certain amounts of testing, but there's nothing like having several thousand players kicking the hell out of the servers.

On the marketing side of things, it's a different story. We're a new player, we're a different game - it's sort of different. It's not an FPS, it's not an RPG - it's fun. I'd say it's an 'online-fantasy-combat-game'. It's about very fast combat, no grinding per-se, no having to collect '23 acorns and bring 'em back to the dude, run half way across the world and collect something else'.

IGN: South Koreans love their MMOs and Fury has a very distinct 'Asian' feel to the game levels and designs. Is this a coincidence? And are you planning to tackle that market?

Andrew Edelsten: It certainly was a consideration. As we progress through development, we actually think the gameplay will be more accepted by western markets, but it will also be attractive to the Koreans and Taiwanese and Chinese. Our new investor is a big player in China and Taiwan. They'll be able to help us with partners there. It's been a wonderful addition to the Auran group.

Andrew Edelsten: They're great. Very similar wavelength to us - Tony Hilliam, our CEO, gets along with them really well and they just strike a chord. They're willing to take risks on games that aren't in the traditional mould, and I think that's wonderful.

IGN: Let's talk about working with Unreal Engine 3. The game looks great, but how scaleable is the engine?

Andrew Edelsten: The artists have been able to do great things; the special effects artists in particular. I mean, the ice lake [on 'Courtyard'] has really good shaders for instance. It also means, though, Unreal Engine 3 does push the hardware. We then had to go, 'well, we can't only have a GeForce 7-only game.

IGN: Will this be a DirectX 10 compatible game? Or are you building Fury with DirectX 9 in mind?

Andrew Edelsten: We will have some DirectX 10 features. They're still being finalised, but basically we're adding the proper DX10 pipeline at the moment. We've got a couple of guys working on that, working with Nvidia and Microsoft closely. We've also got the low-end renderer to cater for GeForce 5 and hopefully even GeForce 4. The engine is quite scaleable now - it wasn't for a long time, but we put our best 3D guys onto it and they made the fall-back renderer look really good and playable and fast.

IGN: A buttery framerate is really important for a twitch action game, after all.

Andrew Edelsten: Yeah - it's not so important for aiming in Fury, because that's auto-done, but you need to be able to see all the animations going on. That's the way you can identify the other players - not so much from what they're looking like - although if someone's wearing cloth armour, it's unlikely they're going to rush at you with a battleaxe. However, some of the healing spells for instance - I can tell exactly which heal they're doing, just by the animation.

So yeah, performance is really important, given the speed of the game. So for us, we really have to hit 30 or 40 frames per second minimum; otherwise, you're not going to be able to play the game effectively.